At the beginning of Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela; or
Virtue Rewarded (1740), Pamela sends her parents the four gold guineas
she has received from Mr. B., advising them to put half of it toward
their "old Debt" and the other half toward their
"comfort."(1) When she discovers her parents have "laid
it up in a rag among the thatch," because of their concern for the
origins of that money, Pamela chides them for storing it and urges them
to "make use of the Money" (p. 29). While Pamela's
concern and specific instructions to her parents on how to distribute
their funds are consistent with a dutiful daughter desirous of her
parent's welfare, they more strikingly reveal Pamela's
approach toward economics. Money, property, and capital, in any form,
are, to Pamela's mind, designed to be put to use, to be invested
for a profit, to bear some form of interest. Critics have commented on
Pamela's fierce accounting abilities and have located her in a
system of exchange based primarily on tangible goods and mercantilism.
James Cruise goes so far as to suggest Pamela's letters record a
"bourgeois autobiography."(2) Certainly we see numerous
examples of her accounting abilities, her shrewd financial assessment of
other (typically male) characters, and her recognition that most aspects
of the socio-cultural world are determined by the absence or presence of
money. But Pamela is more than just thrifty. While I readily acknowledge
Pamela's desire for the accumulation of material goods, I believe
she views them as evidence of future profits rather than as an end in
themselves. Indeed, I would argue that Pamela's more pressing
concern is with a type of speculative investment that makes her, in
essence, a domestic stock-jobber. As the novel progresses, Pamela
departs from the material world of real, tangible goods (for which she
never actually loses her concern) as she becomes increasingly fascinated
with the imaginative world of paper credit and the possibilities it
holds. The discourse in and of the novel locates it firmly within an
emerging consumer culture preoccupied with credit, speculation, and
increasingly intangible forms of property.

Like a stock-jobber in Exchange Alley, Pamela speculatively deals
in symbolic instruments of exchange on her own account. She transforms
the good opinion and fine reputation she has within the household (a
measure of her worth based on past behavior) into a growing source of
credit (faith in her future value and performance).(3) She further
invests in herself for herself by creating her own negotiable paper or
"paper credit," letters and a journal, which acts as an
indicator of her worth. When placed in circulation-with her parents, Mr.
B., or Mr. B.'s social circle-Pamela's written accounts of her
relationship with B. provide her with a growing amount of
"capital" with which to trade or invest within the closed
economy of the novel. But this production of symbolic capital would have
no value if she did not recognize a potential investor in Mr. B., and
her letters and journal act as an ad hoc stock prospectus. B. already
understands the speculative financial economy, having invested
"large sums in government securities, as well as in private
hands" (p. 392), and he proves willing to participate in
Pamela's speculative domestic economy as well. Pamela
simultaneously jobs her paper credit while acting as a projector for her
own stock scheme: Pamela as joint-stock company. Finally, however,
Pamela uses her accumulated interest to translate the credit she has
accrued (a term with significance within an economic system or
marketplace) into virtue, a concept whose meaning expands beyond the
domestic stock exchange Pamela has created and gains currency within the
(idealized) moral economy represented by Mr. B. Pamela transforms Mr.
B.'s estimation of her from that of a "saucebox" to my
"own true virtuous Pamela" by presenting her virtue as a
textual construction within an imaginatively understood value system. In
doing so, she implicitly invites Mr. B. and the reader to invest in her
accounts.

The key terms-credit, interest, capital-derive from
Richardson's novel that draws on the cultural significance of that
language and suggests how the practices of divergent domestic and
financial spheres are connected materially and metaphorically. An
examination of this alternative economy illuminates our understanding of
the cultural work Pamela performs at an historical moment when paper
credit and speculative investment were increasingly important. It also
indicates how fully the novel as a genre relied on the shifting
narrative possibilities introduced by speculative investment. The
financial revolution "changed in decisive ways how people thought
and wrote about themselves and their world," asserts Colin
Nicholson.(4) Concomitantly, Pamela changed the possibilities for a
novel's influence, established new cultural narratives for women,
and manifested the anxieties, possibilities, and instabilities
encountered by an eighteenth-century culture grappling with multiple
notions of economy.

I.

The system of financial speculation that Pamela's ascent
exploits has its origins in England's "financial
revolution" of the 1690s, which introduced the possibility of new
forms of property into the cultural discourse.(5) The innovations of
credit and speculative investment represented a stark departure from the
relationship between the citizen and the state fostered by the idealized
tradition of civic humanism. Civic humanism located the foundations of
citizenship in the ownership of land. From participation in a system of
landed property, the citizen not only constructs a public personality,
but also achieves virtue-civic virtue-that guides his actions and
decisions. Unlike land, the new forms of property-stocks, lottery
tickets, all forms of negotiable paper-were viewed as inherently
intangible and seemingly not grounded in "real" things. In A
Letter to a Conscientious Man Concerning the Use and Abuse of Riches and
the Right and Wrong Ways of Aspiring to Them (1720), speculative
investment is described as "a Business founded upon nothing that is
solid, rational, or honest, but meerly upon Artifice, Trick and
Catch."(6) Such property had an imaginary basis, and the
relationship between sign and signified, between stock and value,
depended on the whim of the marketplace. There was a resistance to
"paper credit"(7) because of its intangible nature and
fundamental insubstantiality. It represented only a promise, not a
tangible good.(8) Additionally, repayment of any investment in a
joint-stock company or, especially, government stock, was in a sense
deferred to a future moment that had to be imaginatively conceived.(9)
Investors part with tangible goods or currency for intangible, indeed
imaginary, possibilities. Speculative investment, then, essentially
requires participation in a fictional narrative about the continuing
worth of the stock; it relies on fantasy rather than reason, and
stimulates the passions, emotions, and imagination of the individual
investors. The initial desire with which an investor participates must
be sustained-and its consummation deferred-indefinitely. The prolonging
and presumably heightening-the arousing and deferring-of desire enable
the continued process of investment. A stock-jobber must make an
emotional as well as economic investment to sustain the financial
narrative in which he chooses to participate.

The "economic man" who privileges his imagination,
emotions, and desires (and participates in this narrative), resides in a
world of inherently unstable values such as opinion and credit.(10)
"Investing men were now expected to be obsessed with what others
thought, or might think of them," observes J. G. A. Pocock.
"The creature of the credit mechanism must be a creature of
passion, fantasy and other-directedness."(11) Speculative
investment and the increasing prominence of credit as a form of property
initially caused conservative cultural critics to regard the new
financial activities as potentially disruptive to the existing
socio-economic order. The ease with which individuals could acquire and
manipulate credit-and by extension the cultural markers of class it
afforded-bespoke what Michael McKeon terms the "status
inconsistency" so disturbing to Augustan critics.(12) The
hierarchical categories of class, property, and even gender potentially
suffered a fundamental instability. Yet by mid-century, the figure of
the economic man, like forms of negotiable paper, was culturally
assimilated into a larger system of national interests. The increasing
dependence on and association with trade, credit, and investment by both
the aristocracy and the middling classes made it necessary to
recuperate, as far as possible, the symbols and activities associated
with speculative finance. The necessity was also located in the middle
classes' desire to legitimize and thus stabilize their position,
and to combat their connection with the more speculative and passionate
aspects of trade. They helped redefine the concepts of virtue,
independence, and citizenship and, in the process, changed the terms of
the evaluative discourse that could be used by or against them. This
transformative process not only extended to the status of the economic
man, but also introduced the connection between credit and virtue. Just
as one could translate one's passions into interests, the cultural
mechanisms also existed to turn one's credit into virtue. Passions,
seen as self-directed and previously residing in the imaginary realm,
were translated into virtue and converted into interests for the whole
of society, indeed the nation. This move was motivated, in part, by a
Whig desire to accommodate innovative finance to traditional cultural
ideals; the terms of the discourse shifted as "credit is now being
translated into virtue in the entirely moral and societal sense of that
word."(13) Instead of being a marker of aristocratic status, virtue
assumes a more practical and practiced existence; an understanding of
virtue emerged that now relied on industry, "talent, frugality and
application."(14)

The recuperation of credit and interest, and the ideological shift
I'm discussing, have specific implications for Samuel Richardson
and his cultural currency as both a printer and an author. In many ways,
Richardson and his own rise to prosperity suggest the cultural
transformation Pamela herself effects. In both his fictional and
financial pursuits, Richardson translated a profession and product based
on inherently unstable signifying systems into a tangible (and certainly
profitable) commodity. His printing and his writing were two mutually
enabling activities inextricably linked to and dependent on a type of
paper credit; he exploited the economic and symbolic value of his
involvement in print culture. By publishing and writing texts as diverse
as Parliamentary accounts and popular fiction, Richardson capitalized on
the range of discourses available to and popular with the reading public
while also constructing his own locus of control within the
culture's larger discursive struggles. Richardson transformed
himself from an industrious apprentice of relatively humble origins into
one of the leading printers of his time. The determination through which
he achieved success certainly bespeaks the potential for
self-improvement implicit in his ideological position. Richardson
recognized the value of investing in himself, and in the rewards of
frugality and moral and financial self-management-he lived an experience
defined by the expanding notions of virtue he presents in Pamela.(15)

His profession demanded an emotional investment in the possibility
for advancement and self-improvement through the production and
consumption of (often fictionally oriented) symbolic instruments-texts
in various forms. Richardson similarly recognized the value of the
conduct book-the self-help manual-in contributing to the rise of the
individual; he benefited from the public's increasing awareness of
the ability of a text to provide information that could improve or alter
one's life. "The growth of the primer, the educational
aide," writes J. H. Plumb, "enabled any earnest apprentice to
struggle up the ladder of self education in his leisure hours."(16)
Familiar Letters on all Occasions (1741) suggests Richardson's
belief that textual self-representation-i.e., an individual's
credit on paper-often determined an individual's success in
personal or professional relationships. Familiar Letters, like An
Apprentice's Vade Mecum (1734), displays Richardson's emphasis
on the future, and the present's effect on that future, and his
certainty that both could be influenced by the power of texts.(17) While
Richardson possessed a fundamentally conservative attitude toward social
relationships, he recognized and profited from the increasingly dynamic
quality of social interactions. Additionally, his print shop served as a
clearing house for a variety of financial and commercial transactions.
Richardson observes in his edition of Aesop's Fables (1739) that he
witnessed "the South-Sea Project, the Bank Contract, the
Charitable-Corporation Bubble, and twenty others that might be named in
this Age so fruitful of such Projects."(18) He would likely have
gained an understanding of, if not appreciation for, the speculative
nature of such projects.

Richardson also seemed to understand-and at some level combat-the
fundamentally speculative nature of the novel. History was perceived by
many as objective, "true," a reflection of some sort of
"reality." Yet the novel retained its association with
unreliability, fantasy, and the imagination-a discourse of intentional
deception. Of course, speculative investment of any kind was regarded in
much the same way. Just as the act of reading a novel depends on the
text's ability to arouse and then defer the reader's desires
(while also enabling them to produce their own desires), so too must a
stock scheme attract, arouse, and sustain an investor-the desire must be
deferred for as long as possible. The publication of novels and the
projecting of a financial venture both require investors to create and
sustain imaginary narratives. Richardson's preoccupation with these
dual narratives, and Pamela's fundamental concern with
negotiations, fictionality, and profit, require us to reassess our
understanding of the novel within this context and consider the cultural
work it performs.

In one way the text is an extended discussion of the value of
narratives (fictional or financial) and their power to entrance, indeed
seduce, a willing reader or investor. Stocks and fiction rely on similar
needs, desires, and fantasies, a reliance that, in part, allows Pamela
to succeed socially, sexually, and economically. An understanding of her
writings-any understanding of "Pamela her own self"-requires
investment in both the romantic fiction Pamela creates and the volatile
paper credit that makes up her virtue, Additionally the text's
preoccupation with investing, conserving, and profiting from different
forms of property provides economic models for its readers. The
`ideal' reader would learn to recognize and use wisely her sexual,
financial, and textual capital. But Richardson also seems to be speaking
more broadly about the powers of transformation that can be found in
various types of self-construction and self-actualization. He is not
arguing for the importance of a serving girl's virtue, but is to a
certain degree making a case for himself, his sense of class, and his
genre. He implicitly speaks to the power of constructed narratives and
of participation in those narratives-whether literary or financial.

II.

Pamela lives in a world defined by financial and fictional
narratives, and she recognizes the importance of investing in the future
and cultivating her value. When the novel begins, Pamela has already
earned a certain amount of credit within the household and, like a
trader in stocks, she scrupulously guards her reputation; she refuses to
"forfeit [her] good name" (p. 28). Capturing the favor of Lady
B., Pamela acquires clothes, social skills, and an education; her
ability "to write and cast Accompts" (p. 25) distinguishes her
from the other servants and marks the slightly higher station from which
she originally came. In true Richardsonian fashion, Mr. B. encourages
Pamela to "look into any of her [ladyship's] books to improve
yourself." As a result of her accomplishments, Pamela is a valued
member of the household who has the good opinion or "good
word" of her employers and fellow servants.

Despite all the credit she accumulates within the household, Pamela
lives with the specter of her debt and worries about returning her
parents to (and maintaining her own) financial solvency. In the novel,
the Andrews' attempt to start their own school has failed, leaving
them financially ruined and lowering their social position. In a 1741
letter to Aaron Hill, Richardson claimed that this aspect of the novel
was based on the true story of a daughter whose parents were
"ruined by suretiship,"(19) a contractual obligation that
makes one legally responsible for another individual's debt.
Similarly, Mrs. Jervis, who becomes Pamela's surrogate mother cum
silent partner, has been forced into service to pay "old Debts for
her Children that were extravagant ... This, tho', was very good in
her" (p. 76). Like Pamela, she is "a Gentlewoman born,
tho' she has had Misfortunes" (p. 30).

Pamela clearly understands what it means to be legally indebted,
and she repeatedly expresses her refusal to incur new debt and her
desire to keep her accounts in order. When she owes John some favors she
wants to erase the "debt" monetarily: "John is very good,
and very honest; ... I'd give him a Guinea, now I'm so rich,
if I thought he'd take it" (p. 87). She strives to appear to
maintain her resources, and resists borrowing from the other servants:
"tho' I warrant I might have what I would of Mrs. Jervis, or
Mr. Jonathan, or Mr. Longman; but then how shall I pay it, you'll
say? And, besides, I don't love to be beholden" (p. 70).
Pamela maintains a keen awareness of the importance of maintaining at
least the appearance of financial solvency: "money runs a little
lowish, after what I have laid out; but I don't care to say so
here" (p. 70). Pamela appraises individuals in terms of their
potential economic usefulness. For example, she reflects on the possible
advantages in her relationship with "kind and civil Mr. Longman our
steward": "He said, once to Mrs. Jervis, he wish'd he was
a young Man for my sake, I should be his Wife, and he would settle all
he had upon me on Marriage, and, you must know, he is reckon'd
worth a Power of Money" (p. 51). She reveals an awareness of her
attractiveness to Longman, and the potential profit of that attraction.
She makes this observation in the context of a longer letter that
suggests her potential for advancement with Mr. B. as well.

Her preoccupation with debt suggests not only its prevalence given
the economic realities of the time, but also Pamela's resistance to
incurring any new debt or obligation-moral, sexual, or economic-that
would force her to squander her capital. Yet for a woman in her position
there is often a fine line between liabilities and assets. Pamela
understands the possibility for advancement and failure within the
social realm: "I have liv'd above myself for some Time
past" (p. 28). Her refusal to be "quite destitute again"
(p. 25, emphasis mine) indicates her awareness of the vagaries of the
marketplace. She realizes her options are limited because she has, in a
sense, over-capitalized-she has "Qualifications above [her]
degree" (p. 25); her extraordinary skills have made it more
difficult for her to move within the servant class: "Much I
fear'd, that as I was taken by her Goodness to wait upon her
person, I should be ... forc'd to return to you and my poor Mother,
who have enough to do to maintain yourselves; ... it would have been no
easy Matter to find a Place that your poor Pamela was fit for" (p.
45). The inability to secure employment would necessarily cause Pamela
to become beholden to someone-her parents, a husband, or a prospective
employer.

Immediately after Lady B.'s death, Pamela receives a crucial
piece of advice from Lady Davers that provides her with a potential
model for avoiding debt, and illustrates the economic law of supply and
demand. Observing that Pamela is "a very pretty wench" with
"a very good character." she advises Pamela to "take care
to keep the Fellows at a Distance: and said, that I might do, and be
more valu'd for it, even by themselves" (p. 29). She is
advised "to keep myself to myself" (p. 29). While Lady Davers
intends this information to be used with other servants or neighborhood
boys, rather than her brother, Pamela lets this principle guide her
interactions with Mr. B. Pamela demonstrates her credit and her worth,
cultivates Mr. B.'s interest (both romantic and economic), and then
raises the price of her stock by keeping him "at a distance"
and introducing the concept of virtue.

To succeed, Pamela must maintain her own credit (and credibility),
as well as that of her potential investors; thus when Mr. B. approaches
Pamela sexually, she initially describes those encounters as threatening
to her credit and reputation, not specifically to her virtue. When Mr.
B. kisses Pamela's hand, she complains that "such a Thing
would ruin his Credit as well as mine" (p. 30). She worries Mr. B.
has "undervalued himself, as to take notice of such a poor girl as
I."(20) Mr. B. must maintain his respectability and status to
remain a good investor. Early in the novel, Pamela balances this concern
for credit and appearances with her desire for immediate profits in the
form of material goods. Pamela keeps delighted accounts of the clothing
she acquires from Mr. B., and her letters resemble a ledger of sorts:
"he has given me a Suit of my old Lady's Cloaths, and half a
Dozen of her Shifts, and Six fine Handkerchiefs, and Three of her
Cambrick Aprons, and Four Holland ones" (p. 30). She later counts
gifts of shoes, buckles and stockings with equal interest and
specificity: "Two Suits of fine Flanders lac'd Head-cloths,
Three Pair of fine Silk Shoes ... Four Pair of fine white Cotton
Stockens, and Three Pair of fine Silk ones; and Two Pair of rich
Stays" (p. 31). Pamela reflects the stereotypically bourgeois
concern with the accumulation of commodities.

When Pamela decides to leave B.-hall, she claims she will leave all
these clothes behind, "as he expected other Returns for his
Presents, than I intended ... to make him; so I thought it was but just
to leave his Presents behind me when I went away: for, you know, if I
could not earn his Wages, why should I have them?" (p. 53). Yet she
clearly indicates the success of her "project" to have the
clothes sent after her when she leaves:

I hear nothing of my Lady's Cloaths, and those my Master gave me: For I
told Mrs. Jervis, I would not take them; but I fansy, by a Word or two that
was dropt, they will be sent after me. Dear sirs! what a rich Pamela you'll
have, if they should! But as I can't wear them, if they do, I don't desire
them; and will turn them into Money, as I can have Opportunity. (P. 87)

She relies on the "word" in the marketplace, on the rumor
and opinion she hears; she tells one thing but intends another. She
doesn't desire "them"-the actual clothes-she prefers to
have the profit she can get for them.

The clothes allow Pamela to adorn and thus enrich herself, but they
also represent potential capital-she can put them to use by converting
them to money. While these gifts represent an initial payment to Pamela
(or, perhaps, the interest she gains from the principal of her beauty),
she recognizes that such non-negotiable goods are, in fact, less useful
than actual currency. To her parents she expresses her wish that
"it was no Affront to him to make Money of them [the gifts], and
send it to you: it would do me more good" (p. 30). Her desire for
circulating currency allows her to rationalize her acceptance of money
indirectly given by Mr. B.: "he has this Moment sent me five
guineas by Mrs. Jervis, as a Present for my Pocket; so I shall be very
rich; for as she brought them, I thought I might take them" (p.
87). She balances fiscal responsibility and social decorum. She boasts
about her plans or "projects" to convert clothes into money,
and her ability to save that money for future investment:
"You'll say, I was no bad Housewife to have sav'd so much
Money" (p. 53). She is already beginning to cultivate and advertise
the values of industry and frugality that will become part of her
virtue.

Pamela's preoccupation with appearance also causes her to
remake herself in rustic dress. She decides to abandon the luxurious
clothes she received from Mr. B. in favor of dress "that would
become my condition" (p. 52), both to maintain her reputation and
to give heightened credibility to her textual accounts. In anticipation
of returning to her parents, Pamela procures "rustic" clothes,
appropriate for her life away from B.-Hall. She expresses her
anticipation of them in a way that suggests their ability to disguise
and transform: "I long to have them on. I know I shall surprise
Mrs. Jervis with them; for she shan't see me till I am
full-dress'd" (p. 59). The new rustic attire represents Pamela
as she longs to be seen-as an innocent young girl-and, more important,
allows her to control how she is seen. This is the first of many times
she remakes herself through her "projecting" (p. 77); she uses
her own "industry" (p. 76) and her buying power to acquire the
humbler clothing. (Although Pamela's description of her rustic
clothes suggest they are not truly humble, rather "ordinary I mean
to what I have been lately used to" [p. 60].) The rustic dress
serves as another symbolic instrument that Pamela creates and places
into circulation, and it suggests the transformative power of money. In
the most fundamental way it conflates the multiple meanings of
investment-not only is Pamela investing in her future with her narrative
construction of virtue, she is literally "in-vesting" herself
with the material signifiers of the persona she wishes to present to B.
She clothes herself in her virtue (as she will do later when she
literally wears her letters on her body) to increase her credibility in
a way that makes her simultaneously impenetrable and even more
desirable. The episode also indicates how easily Pamela, in a world of
fundamentally ambiguous signifiers, can recreate herself: "O the
Pleasure of descending with Ease" (p. 60). Pamela's
declaration "I never lik'd myself so well in my life"
seems rooted in her perceived success at self-fashioning; she is
"metamorphos'd" (p. 60).

When Pamela descends the stairs having "trick'd [her]self
up" in her new clothes, Rachel "did not know her," nor
did Mrs. Jervis, which prompts the latter to observe "I never knew
the like of thee" (p. 61). Pamela is different from all the other
servants and also fundamentally unknowable. In light of the profound
(and literal) impenetrability of Pamela, Mrs. Jervis's admonition
"pray don't reveal yourself till he finds you out" (p.
61) has meaning beyond Pamela's seeming disguise and speaks to her
inscrutable nature throughout the novel. Her attempts at
self-empowerment also inform the whole scene. Once she dons her rustic
gown she, like the economic man, invokes the power of Fortuna: "Let
Fortune's Wheel turn round as it will" (p. 60).(21) The
invocation to Fortuna, traditionally viewed in opposition to virtue and
often regarded as a marker of an individual's ambition beyond his
or her degree, further allies Pamela with the uncertain world of trade,
speculation, and commerce, and intensifies the understanding of her
virtue as a primarily textual construction.(22)

Such language, indeed the entire episode with rustic clothing,
underscores the larger element of masquerade and disguise that pervades
the whole novel. When B. encounters Pamela he claims she has
intentionally tricked him: "you must disguise yourself, to attract
me" (p. 62). Yet she asserts she has been "in disguise indeed
ever since my good Lady, your Mother, took me from my poor parents ...
and ... heap'd upon me rich cloathes, and other bounties" (p.
62). Although Pamela considers the rustic dress her "own
self," it really acts as another in a series of disguises in the
novel.(23) Like Exchange Alley, B.-Hall becomes a site of social mixing
with the removal of the signifying codes of previously established
cultural classifications. This transformation is, of course, regarded as
an intentional trick by Mr. B. who says he has been
"robb'd" (p. 63); it has caused him to lay out an excess
of capital in terms of revealing his own desire. He reacts in a slightly
scattered, somewhat frenzied manner. B. tells Pamela: "I can
neither bear, nor forbear her ... But stay, you shan't go!--Yet
begone!--No, come back again" (p. 62). This instance is the first
in a series of moments where B.'s own behavior metaphorically (and
appropriately) mirrors that of the new economic man.

Pamela worries that this incident has "cost" her her
place and that she will suffer an immediate loss. As Mr. B.'s
pursuit of Pamela continues, however, Pamela changes her attitude; she
sacrifices an immediate short-term profit in hopes of a greater return
in the long run. Pamela's resistance to Mr. B.'s advances, and
her dutiful recording of those, provide her with credit from B. and her
parents, and contribute to her virtue. Early in the novel, B. offers
Pamela a verbal contract with a quid pro quo arrangement: "I tell
you, I will make a Gentlewoman of you, if you be obliging" (p. 35).
Pamela rejects such an offer outright both because it relies on
B.'s word rather than a documented exchange and because it is not
the best deal for her. Pamela resists being seen as tangible property
that can be easily bought; in fact she repeatedly refers to her
"very worthless body" (p. 151). Pamela realizes that gifts and
coins, while immediately gratifying, ultimately have limited value for
her. They establish a system of exchange in which she will probably
lose. The real potential for financial rewards exists in shifting the
relationship and the terms of the exchange from the material world of
goods (kisses for stockings), to an imaginatively based world of
speculative investment, paper credit, and negotiable paper.

From the beginning of the novel, Pamela is always writing,
manipulating paper, exercising her imaginative powers in the creation of
an intangible set of values offered in her narrative. Once Pamela is
taken out to Lincolnshire estate and imprisoned, writing becomes
Pamela's full-time job; she rarely does anything else. "I Have
so much Time upon my Hands, that I must write on to employ myself"
(p. 134). Pamela increasingly understands that her writing is an
investment in her future. Her imaginative and textual creation of self
represents her unwavering investment in her virtue-a completely
intangible construct that determines the course of the relationship with
Mr. B. Pamela's virtue is a commodity the reader and Mr. B. receive
only on paper. The real value of Pamela's virtue will never appear;
the moment when B. gains `material' proof of her virtue-her
virginity-it, of course, ceases to exist. Virtue is a purely verbal
construct that gains currency within the self-enclosed economic system
established by Pamela. By calling Pamela's virtue a product of her
imagination, I do not mean to suggest (as Fielding or Haywood do) that
Pamela is somehow not virtuous. Rather, her discourse provides the only
value Pamela's virtue has. Her paper credit, like a stock, composes
a narrative that seeks and ultimately gains an emotional and financial
investment from Mr. B. as he becomes increasingly involved in the
fictional narrative that constitutes her virtue.

Her text also plays on B.'s appetites, passions, and emotions,
and creates his desire to invest in her. It has the power to increase
his desire by offering a textual account of the arousing experiences he
has already had. Pamela's mirroring of text and experience, or read
and lived encounters, heightens B.'s desires while deferring their
consummation. The only "satisfaction" B. gets is from his
possession of the letters. As Mr. B. observes, Pamela is a "pretty
story in Romance" (p. 42). The two narratives-fictional and
financial-are inextricably linked and mutually informing. Investment in
the one necessarily requires investment in the other. When Pamela first
recognizes Mr. B.'s attraction to her, she admits she has
"read of things almost as strange, from great men to poor
damsels" (p. 74), indicating her familiarity with romance.(24) He
realizes the power of Pamela's narrative despite its fundamentally
intangible basis: "you may as well have real Cause to take these
Freedoms with me, as to make my Name suffer for imaginary ones" (p.
41). At times she resorts to the lines she has read as the basis for her
verbal defense: "O how I was terrify'd! I said, like as I had
read in a Book a Night or two before, Angels, and Saints, and all the
Host of Heaven, defend me!" (p. 41). Initially B. sees her
protestations of virtue as located in that tradition: "You have a
very pretty romantic Turn for Virtue, and all that" (p. 71). He
uses the same attitude with Goodman Andrews, claiming "I think thou
has read Romances as well as thy Daughter, and thy Head's
turn'd with them" (p. 93).

While the abduction to Lincolnshire fits into the plot of a
romance, it forces Pamela to reassess her situation and reestablish her
credit. She has a new set of individuals with which to deal, and she has
to make appropriate adjustments. When Pamela first arrives at
Lincolnshire, she evaluates the potential usefulness of the people
around her, determining they are all "strange Creatures, that
promise nothing" (p. 105). Mrs. Jewkes tricks her out of the only
coins she has to prevent her from making a "bad Use of it" and
corrupting Nan "with Money or fine things" (p. 121). In the
absence of real money, Pamela attempts various other
"projects" that depend on the strength of her cunning and
B.'s attitude toward her. For example, she attempts to win Mrs.
Jewkes' confidence by showing her a letter from Mr. B.:

I thought, when I had written this Letter, and that which he had
prescrib'd, it would look like placing a Confidence in Mrs. Jewkes, to shew
them to her; and I shew'd her at the same time, my Master's Letter to me;
for I believ'd, the Value he expressed for me, would give me Credit with
one who profess'd in every thing to serve him right or wrong. (P. 110,
emphasis mine)

She hopes B.'s letter will act like a letter of credit from a
bank allowing Pamela to borrow on the good opinion he has of her. She
similarly tries to get Williams to participate in her project to escape,
but he proves to be a bad risk; he lacks the cunning necessary to
service her plans: "his Over-security and Openness, have ruined us
both" (p. 148).

Lincolnshire also signals a slight shift in Mr. B.'s attitude
as well. He is transformed from a member of the landed elite disdainful
of Pamela's scribbling to a frenzied, slightly feminized economic
man eager to invest in Pamela's scheme. Initially, like a
conservative ideologue, Mr. B. repeatedly complains that Pamela never
does any "real" work: "This Girl is always scribbling; I
think she may be better employ'd" (p. 34). He later calls her
an "idle girl" and claims she minds her "Pen more than
[her] Needle" (p. 55). He continues by saying he doesn't want
such "idle Sluts," linking the middle-class conceptions of
industry and chastity with virtue. Certainly he is bothered by the
apparent lack of tangible product for her efforts, but he is also
nervous about her textual creation of self and the negotiable paper she
produces. He resists her rejection of the world of tangible goods, where
he has more power, for the imaginatively conceived world of virtue and
paper credit. He laments that "Pride of Birth and Fortune"
cannot "obtain Credit" with Pamela (p. 84). That type of
authority can't buy him anything, even though he loves Pamela to
"extravagance" (p. 83).

Mr. B. also questions the value of Pamela's reputation, and by
extension her credit, and its relationship to his own world. He tells
Mrs. Jervis: "I know Pamela has your good Word; but do you think
her of any Use in the Family? ... Why that Word virtuous?" (p. 39).
He is suspicious of her possible plans for other servants: "but
'tis my Opinion, she is an artful young Baggage; and had I a young
handsome Butler or Steward, she'd soon make her Market of one of
them, if she thought it worth while to snap at him for a Husband"
(p. 39). Nevertheless, her text plays on B.'s appetites, passions,
and emotions. He is increasingly beguiled by the notion of investing in
Pamela (instead of bartering for her as he initially intended).
Consequently, he abandons his aristocratic demeanor (peering through
keyholes and rifling through her letters) in his pursuit of her. Perhaps
the fullest example of this abandonment occurs when B. disguises himself
as Nan. Wearing Nan's "Gown and Petticoat" with "her
Apron over his Face and Shoulders" (p. 175), B. observes Pamela
from a chair. When Nan/B. comes to bed, Pamela expresses concern that
her breathing was "all quick and short" (p. 176) and she
"quiver'd like an Aspin-leaf" (p. 176). B. literally
changes gender signifiers in an attempt to gratify his overwhelming
desire for Pamela. Led by his passions and emotions, he, like the
economic man, becomes a feminized creature. He abandons all sense of
class distinctions. Similarly, he now places increasing importance in
Pamela's reputation and credit. As he learns Mrs. Jervis's
estimation of Pamela and the general opinion of the other servants
within the household, he gains a renewed interest in
"investing" in Pamela:

All the Servants, from the highest to the lowest, doat upon you, instead of
envying you; and look upon you in so superior a Light, as speaks what you
ought to be. I have seen more of your Letters than you imagine, (This
surpriz'd me!), and am quite overcome with your charming manner of Writing
... all put together, makes me, as I tell you, love you to Extravagance.
(P. 83)

B.'s inability to penetrate Pamela, and his recognition that
he must look to her paper credit rather than her physical body for
worth, cause this change in his approach. When Mr. B. wants to escalate
the relationship to another level of physical intimacy by making Pamela
his mistress, he sends her an elaborately written proposal detailing the
economic benefits to her. Nancy Armstrong suggests that "[w]hile
Mr. B. offers money in exchange for her body, she maintains that her
real value does not derive from her body; she is not, in other words,
currency in a system of exchange among men."(25) Armstrong
attributes Pamela's value to her gender, her "female
subjectivity," and her language, and reads her resistance
throughout the novel as the triumph of the modern self over traditional
forms of political power. While Pamela's maneuvers certainly are
political in that they involve the play of power, her rejection of
B.'s proposal is a profoundly economic act. Pamela will not allow
herself to be used as currency in a system of exchange among men because
she has already constructed an alternative financial model. Pamela wants
Mr. B. to invest in her, not buy her outright, He must recognize and
believe in the potential returns (moral, sexual, economic, domestic) she
has to offer; he cannot be diverted by his desire for immediate
gratification.

Although his written proposal indicates his belief that his
relationship with Pamela has long-term potential, he wants to test it,
to borrow against rather than invest in the future. Unfortunately for
Mr. B., Pamela is a much shrewder litigant. B. introduces the
possibility of marriage in Item VII: "if your Conduct be such, that
I have Reason to be satisfied with it, I know not (but will not engage
for this) that I may, after a Twelvemonth's Cohabitation, marry
you" (p. 167). With this statement, he unwittingly causes his terms
to necessarily be rejected. Pamela recognizes that marriage is in fact a
possibility and that she has "undervalued" her stock, so to
speak. If she accepts these terms, she will sell at too low a price, and
also lose the credit she has already established. Her rejection under
the guise of virtue and propriety only further increases her value; B.
insists "I would divide with all my Soul, my Estate with you, to
make you mine upon my own Terms. These you have absolutely rejected; and
that, tho' in sawcy Terms enough, yet, in such a manner, as makes
me admire you more ... And I see you so watchful over your Virtue, that
tho' I hop'd to find it otherwise, I cannot but say, my
Passion for you is increas'd by it" (pp. 183-84). Indeed,
Pamela has done precisely what Lady Davers initially suggested; she has
held B. at a distance and consequently made herself more attractive and
thus valuable as a result. Through resistance and savvy negotiation,
Pamela is able to achieve the end she wants and to transform her credit
into virtue.

Before Mr. B. ostensibly sends Pamela away to marry Williams, he
reads her journal and letters, which he describes as a "fond Folly
[that] ... cost me so dear" (p. 213). His reading or
"borrowing" of her paper credit only prolongs the negotiation
and increases her value: "Your Papers shall be faithfully
return'd you, and I have paid so dear for my Curiosity in the
Affection they have rivetted upon me for you, that you would look upon
yourself amply reveng'd, if you knew what they have cost me"
(p. 214). Pamela extracts her fee and the "cost" to Mr. B. is
his increasing affection; he is ready to invest in Pamela. He has
nothing tangible, save Pamela herself, on which to base his good
opinion; his infatuation and his ultimate commitment to her in the form
of marriage are ultimately speculative. His final agreement to marry
Pamela represents his emotional and economic investment in her
imaginative narrative. The pretty romance B. complained Pamela was
writing becomes a story he accepts as true.

The discussions of the marriage illustrate how Pamela's paper
credit, transformed into virtue, constitutes a completely negotiable,
albeit intangible, property within the economy of the novel. On the eve
of her wedding, Pamela imagines how Mr. B. would be concerned with the
legal preparations if he were marrying a "Lady of Birth and
Fortune": "all the Eve to the Day, would be taken up in
reading, signing and sealing of Settlements, and Portion, and
such-like" (p. 282). Indeed Pamela observes "how poor is it to
offer nothing but Words for such generous Deeds!" (p. 283). Mr. B.
assures her that what she brings to the marriage is equal to any dowry:
"To all that know your Story and your Merit, it will appear, that I
cannot recompense you for what I have made you suffer ... who shall
grudge you the Reward of the hard-bought Victory?" (p. 283).(26)
Yet the victory is one fought over intangible values for very tangible
goods. The terms have now completely shifted-B, hopes he has enough
credit to ensure the maintenance of Pamela's virtue. Mr. B. claims
to "have no Business ... of equal value to [Pamela's]
company" (p. 311). As his primary business, Pamela has required an
elaborate and intricate process of negotiation, investment, and
capitalization.

Once married, Pamela uses her paper credit to convince Lady Davers
and others of her worth. When Lady Davers arrives unexpectedly to find
Pamela, now Mrs. B., alone she harasses the former servant and refuses
to believe a legitimate marriage occurred. She will not take
Pamela's "word" for it. The spoken word or Mr. B.'s
letter to Pamela have no credit; even Mr. B.'s later pleas for
Pamela's new status go unheeded. Only Pamela's written account
convinces Lady Davers of her worthiness: "I can find, by your
Writings, that your Virtue is but suitably rewarded" (p. 374).
Pamela agrees to circulate her letters, "not doubting your generous
Allowances, as I have had his [Mr. B.'s]" (p. 375). While Lady
Davers can only provide social acceptance in contrast to Mr. B.'s
financially oriented "allowances," "the Sight of
[Pamela's] Papers" (p. 375) persuades Lady Davers that she has
the virtue necessary for her new station. Lady Davers, like B., makes a
social and emotional investment, and through the process of narrative
involvement imaginatively transforms Pamela' s textual account into
proof of her virtue.

III.

As Mrs. B., Pamela translates her considerable financial abilities
to an expanded domestic economy. Mr. B. puts her in charge of her own
accounts, 200 guineas a year. He insists that she not be uneasy about
the amount since, in addition to his prosperous estate, he lays "up
Money every Year, and have besides, large Sums in Government and other
Securities" (p. 306). While he expects "no Account" for
the money, by placing the distribution of the sum in the context of his
other financial dealings, he implicitly characterizes Pamela as one in a
series of investments. In the final recuperation (or perhaps
reinvestment) of her assets, Pamela translates the accounting skills
that enabled her success into expert household management, a
domesticated virtue. Pamela is still determined to put her money to use:

I am resolv'd to keep Account of all these Matters, and Mr. Longman has
already furnish'd me with a Vellum-book of all white Paper; some Sides of
which I hope soon to fill, with the Names of proper Objects: And tho' my
dear master has given me all this without Account, yet shall he see, (but
nobody else) how I lay it out from Quarter to Quarter; and I will, if any
be left, carry it on, like an Accomptant, to the next Quarter, and strike a
Ballance four times a Year, and a general Ballance at every Year's End.
(Pp. 387-88)

Pamela's new financial ledger is as intimate a journal as the
one she kept during her captivity. Moreover, Pamela will use this new
ledger to maintain her credibility with Mr. B. She will show these
accounts (an ad hoc investor's report or an annual summary), like
her personal writings, to her "beloved master ... (but nobody
else)."

With her marriage and her absorption into B.'s economy, Pamela
fully translates her credit into virtue, a virtue proved or maintained
by a show of financial solvency. However, Pamela does not lose her
concern with turning a profit, and she conflates the aristocratic ideal
of the moral economy and good deeds with the new economic man's
understanding of investment. She asks her parents for a "List of
the honest and worthy Poor" (p. 408) so she might carefully
dispense her money among them and put it to use: "[F]or the Money
lies by me, and brings me no Interest. You see I am become a mere
Usurer; and want to make Use upon Use" (p. 409). Appearing in the
last letter of the novel, this passage most accurately characterizes
Pamela's attitude toward capital, investments, and profit. Pamela
is endlessly concerned with getting a return on her investment, on
making her sexual, financial, and fictional capital work for her-whether
it is self-generated paper credit or her annual allotment of pin money.
When Pamela calls herself a "mere usurer" she, in fact,
identifies her guiding principle through the book. Like a usurer, she
has lent her capital-journal, letters-to Mr. B. and allowed it to be
circulated, but at a very high rate of interest. With a verbal,
imaginatively conceived account of her experiences-with her paper
credit-she gains a profitable marriage and an annual allowance. By using
an alternative form of currency and determining her own rate of
exchange, Pamela (at least in Part One) temporarily transcends the
patriarchal economy of exchange in women and creates her own domestic
economy in which Mr. B. must invest.

Pamela's preoccupation with investment, credit, and the
construction of virtue suggests a wider cultural anxiety about a
woman's use of her sexual, financial, and textual capital-an
anxiety informed by the changing notions of property. It also suggests
an increasing desire for discursive evidence of inherently intangible
things. In The Penny London Post: or the Morning Advertiser from the
week of January 8, 1750, an advertisement for The Lady's Compleat
Pocket-Book appeared. For one shilling, this conveniently sized
`pocket-book' claimed to provide women-for at least the year-with
the most important information needed to negotiate the town. The
Pocket-Book offered everything from "rates, rules and orders
relating to Coachmen, Chairmen, Carmen and Watermen, in order to prevent
any Imposition offered to those who are unacquainted with the Town"
to "Directions for dancing forty-eight new country-Dances
compos'd for the present year." A woman could learn how to get
around town and what to do once she got where she was going. Most
significant is the Pocket-Book's promise to serve as a
prefabricated vehicle for recording and reviewing one's life. It
acts as a "Memorandum-Book for every Day in the Year, so
dispos'd as to discover at one view, what Cash is received, what
paid, What Appointments or Engagements are on Hand; and other occasional
Business of Importance." The annual purchase (and subsequent
preservation) of these "pocketbooks"-since they will "be
continued every year"-will enable "any Lady to tell What
Business she has transacted, and What Company been in every Day, during
any Period of her Life." A woman will be able to reflect on past
days or past years as time well spent.

Like Pamela's "vellum-book of all white paper," the
Pocket-Book offered a way for women to keep their accounts in order. It
provided a potential journal of appointments, primer of dances and
social rituals, and ledger in which to note "cash received"
and "what paid." With such a volume, women will, in effect, be
able to record the daily business of their lives, to create their own
"paper credit." Like Pamela, these women can turn the
"business ... transacted" into a narrative that can
demonstrate their fiscal responsibility, economy, and continued
frugality-their attempts to act within the redefined parameters of
middle-class values that increasingly define virtue. Ironically, though,
this possible marker (or perhaps measure) of women's virtue and
dutifulness now resides in the potentially unreal world of paper
credit-as women `take stock' of their activities, gain
`credit' for learning the latest dances and city customs, and learn
how to act credibly with coachmen so as not to be financially gullible.
Women increasingly invest in ways of investing in themselves. They are
all potentially some sort of `domestic stock-jobber.' The offering
of such a text less than a decade after the appearance of Pamela
suggests the pervasiveness of the concerns Richardson explored. Pamela
addresses not only issues of social volatility, cultural capital, and
speculative finance; it also indicates how fully eighteenth-century
culture, informed by fictional and financial narratives, had embraced
the act of writing, accounting, and investing as a means of
self-actualization, if not transformation.

NOTES

(1) Pamela or, Virtue Rewarded, T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D.
Kimpel, eds. (First published 1740; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1971). All subsequent references will be made parenthetically.
The following individuals made valuable suggestions on earlier versions
of this essay: Paula R. Backscheider, Glen Coburn, Miles McCrimmon, the
members of the Folger Institute Colloquium, "Women in the
Eighteenth Century," and the anonymous readers of this essay.

(2) James Cruise, "Pamela and the Commerce of Authority,"
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 87 (1988): 342-88. Readers of
Richardson's novel (beginning with Henry Fielding and Eliza
Haywood) have recognized Pamela's preoccupation with money. For
example, lan Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1957) places Pamela and her connection with B. in a
relationship defined by the powers of capitalism, though not necessarily
speculative investment. Terry Eagleton's The Rape of Clarissa:
Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982) discusses the class anxiety Pamela
mediates, an anxiety certainly connected to the larger financial issues
discussed here. Eagleton's more broadly based concerns pursue
issues of class struggle rather than specific economic practices. Mona
Sheuermann attempts to dismantle the "perception" that women
were not interested or involved in wealth in her study of the
eighteenth-century novel, Her Bread to Earn (Lexington: Univ. Press of
Kentucky, 1993). In her conclusion, she mentions Pamela's
accounting abilities and asserts "her awareness of money ...
defines her character" (pp. 245-46). However, her study, which
engages a critical perspective different from my own, does not offer a
sustained discussion of Pamela or explore women's involvement with
speculative investment. Other recent discussions of class, economy, and
Pamela include James Cruise, "Fielding, Authority and the New
Commercialism in Joseph Andrews," ELH 54 (1987): 253-75;
Christopher Flint, "Anxiety of Affluence: Family and Class
(Dis)order in Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded," Studies in English
Literature 29 (1989): 489-524; and Ann Louise Kibbie, "Sentimental
Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," ELH 58.3
(1991): 561-77, among others. What I hope this essay demonstrates is my
concern with Pamela as an actor in an economy specifically marked by
speculative investment and the new financial instruments, rather than as
an subject more generally concerned with commerce, money, and accounting
in a manner consistent with the middle classes during this period. While
the latter is certainly an accurate characterization of Pamela, her
motivations, as I suggest, are more complicated than that.

(3) Obviously the term "credit" is not introduced in the
eighteenth century, nor is its meaning limited to commercial
transactions. As early as the sixteenth century, as the Oxford English
Dictionary details, credit denoted trust, the quality of being worthy of
belief, or personal influence based on confidence of others. While this
essay deals with credit primarily in the commercial sense as it is
understood in eighteenth-century financial culture, these earlier
meanings deepen and complement rather than preclude the discussion.

(5) By the "financial revolution," I refer to the
development of a flexible credit network, improved techniques of
exchange, a Bank of England, and a growing paper economy introduced
primarily in the 1690s that fundamentally altered the economy of
Britain. The standard discussion of the financial revolution is P. G. M.
Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development
of Public Credit (New York: St. Martin Press, 1967). J. G. A. Pocock
discusses the financial revolution and its effect on the relationship
between virtue and commerce extensively in much of his work (some cited
below). His most concentrated discussions of the financial revolution
and the issues addressed here include The Machiavellian Moment:
Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), chaps. 8 and 9, and "The
Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology,"
Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History,
Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1985), pp. 103-23. In Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of
Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (originally published 1968; reprinted
Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), Isaac Kramnick discusses what he
terms the "Economic Revolution" in similar terms (pp. 39-48,
65-70). John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English
State 1688-1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), looks at the
relationship between commerce and war, and the transformation in the
British government that enabled the development of the
"fiscal-military state" (p. xvii). He also examines the
importance of taxes in the financial revolution (chap. 4, and pp.
178-89).

(8) In his recent and compelling study, Models of Value:
Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke Univ.
Press, 1996), James Thompson discusses how the "interrelation
between the development of the novel and economic change" must be
understood as "mediated by the concurrent development of political
economy as a discourse and the novel as a discourse" (p. 8).
Chapters one and two, on political economy and monetary theory
respectively, lay the groundwork for his provocative model. He does not
discuss Pamela, though claims "similar arguments can be mounted
about Samuel Richardson" (p. 8).

(9) Pocock, discussing this deferral in terms of the repayment of
government stock, observes "Government stock is a promise to repay
at a future date; from the inception and development of the National
Debt, it is known that this date will in reality never be reached ...
Government is therefore maintained by the investor's imagination
concerning a moment which will never exist in reality." This is not
to suggest that individuals never saw any return on their investment-if
that were the case, few would invest. Rather, the point is that the
process of repayment is deferred and that the absolute moment of
repayment is never actually realized. "The Mobility of Property and
the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology," Virtue, Commerce and
History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the
Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), p. 112.

(10) Pocock further suggests that such reliance causes the
stock-jobber to be perceived as feminized or even an effeminate being.
"Trading on expectations," economic man must rely on the
imaginative forces necessary for financial investment in a fluctuating
market, an environment "where production and exchange are regularly
equated with the ascendancy of the passions and the female
principle." "Mobility of Property," p. 114.

(13) Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 456. For a discussion of how
passions are translated into interests see Albert O. Hirschman, The
Passions and The Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before
Its Triumph (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977).

(14) Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Domesticating `Virtue':
Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America," Literature and The
Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1988), p. 164. An important discussion of the
transformation of the concept of virtue can be found in Shelley
Burtt's Virtue Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992)
which asserts that civic virtue is transformed rather than eclipsed,
details the "varieties of virtue" (p. 12) circulating in
eighteenth-century culture, and explores the "politics of the
politics of virtue" (p. 37). For her specific response to
Pocock's work, see pp. 32-37.

(22) Pocock traces the virtue-fortune polarity throughout the civic
humanist tradition, from Boethius's configuration to its
Neo-Harringtonian manifestation. Though discussed at multiple points in
The Machiavellian Moment, see particularly pp. 36-41, 84-97, and 349-75.

(23) Terry Castle observes that Pamela introduces a carnivalesque
element to B.-Hall as she penetrates the upper reaches of the society.
"Pamela remains, one could argue, one of the greatest carnivalesque
plots in literature. It has to do with the violation of taxonomic
boundaries, with unprecedented (and gratifying) couplings of things that
should remain apart: high and low, masters and servant, rake and
virgins." Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in
Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford Univ.
Press, 1986), pp. 135-36.

(24) Of course Richardson further cultivates that impression among
his readers when, in the subtitle to the text, he terms Pamela "a
beautiful young damsel."

(25) Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political
History of the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 115.
Armstrong's discussion of Pamela (pp. 108-34) focuses on the
political implications of the novel; she is concerned with the way
Richardson empowers Pamela, locating that power within her female
subjectivity and self-possession. It is, she suggests, a text that
"repackages political resistance as the subjectivity of a
woman" (p. 132). Armstrong places it within a broader cultural and
discursive transformation that results in the "feminization"
of the novel and the reorganization of political power within the
domestic household and in specifically gendered terms. While
Armstrong's significant study has influenced subsequent
scholarship, her discussion of Pamela, though persuasive on some issues,
ignores the material and symbolic economy that, to my mind, pervades the
novel. Like Armstrong, I think Richardson endows Pamela with a great
deal of power and value. But, unlike Armstrong, I think Pamela
constructs her value within an imaginative and speculative domestic
economy dependent on her letters, journals, and other forms of paper
credit. When Armstrong does discuss economics, in the broadest sense of
the term, she suggests that Pamela's "will ... poses an
alternative moral economy to that of the dominant class" (p. 114).
Certainly Pamela's actions, like the credit economy generally,
offer an alternative to the moral economy but they are profoundly
informed by speculative investment.

(26) The 1801 edition continues "My fortune is the more
valuable to me, in the world's eye, to do credit to your
virtue" (p. 367).

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